How Not To Commit Crimes Against Fine Furniture: A Basic Guide

May 26, 1985|By Lisa Anderson.

Crimes against fine furniture are committed every day, almost always by upstanding people with the best of intentions. Some of them are petty and some of them are deadly, but all of them are guaranteed to bring suffering to the furniture and heartbreak and expense to its owner.

At a recent seminar, John Stair, managing director of Sotheby`s Restoration, gave a rundown on the most common offenses and how to avoid committing them:

-- ``The biggest mistake people make is getting a piece of furniture and deciding to do something to it themselves, instead of first finding out what it is. Until you know what it is, don`t do anything.`` It is not only crucial to ascertain the age, type of wood and origin of an object, but to know whether it is solid wood or veneer.

-- ``Some of these situations arise in estate situations,`` said Stair, recalling a recent furniture crime committed by a client. ``You know, Granny dies and you go to her house and she had what a lot of people would call a lawn chair, a folding wooden, ocean-liner type chair. So the client sprayed it with red paint. It turned out to be one of the orginal designs by Josef Hoffman (an early 20th Century Viennese designer), worth $8,000 to $10,000. So, for $600, we took the paint off it for her, without disturbing the original finish, which is a tricky thing to do. Unfortunately, sometimes you can`t reverse it that easily. One of the most critical things in restoration, that all knowledgable restorers agree upon, is that you`re not supposed to do anything to a piece of furniture that you can`t undo.``

This sort of heartbreak can be avoided with some simple research, such as consulting an auction house or museum or looking it up in the library. Otherwise, he offers this chilling caveat: ``You can make a $10,000 object into a $2,000 object real fast, with very little effort.``

-- ``One of the most common mistakes, I think, is the use of oil. Basically, no oil is used in any polishing of fine furniture. This is because any oil darkens the wood, which you basically don`t want, and any oil attracts dust. So, short term and long term, you`re in serious trouble.``

-- If your idea of polishing fine furniture involves getting out a spray can of anything, forget it, he says. ``You can`t use any of the spray polishes on antique furniture. Most of them contain silicone and, if you have a nice piece of furniture, after a couple of years, you`d see almost a haze across it. Then, someone has to come in and take that haze off for you and repolish

(apply a new finish) the top of it. You have to use a paste wax and wax the furniture,`` says Stair, who recommends using butcher`s wax about three times a year. A frequently used dining-room table, for instance, might be waxed six times a year.

-- ``There are a lot of great superstitions and I`ve heard most of them,`` said Stair. He recalled, for instance, one woman`s solution to keeping the proper degree of moisture in the wood of her 18th-Century French writing table. She would stick its legs into four coffee cans filled with oil so that the table could soak up the oil and stay ``nice and moist.`` The result: four black legs and a $2,000 bill to get the oil out.

-- ``Everyone talks about temperature, but nobody talks about humidity,`` Stair said. ``Antiques are a big pain in the neck, they really are. But if you`re going to buy them, you`ve got to take care of them.`` That includes providing the proper humidity, which ideally, should be kept at a steady 55 to 60 percent. This requires a humidifier in the winter months, which nobody likes because they tend to be ugly, he said. Uglier still, however, are the half-inch cracks that will almost assuredly rend fine furniture (``like a pistol shot in the night``) if wood expands and contracts due to abrupt shifts in humidity. Steam heat is particularly dangerous for fine furniture, noted Stair.

-- `` `Strip` is a word you don`t want to use. Strip implies to most people a paste stripper. We very rarely strip a piece of furniture because if you strip it, you`re going to have to sand it. And if you sand it, you`re going to destroy the integrity of the piece.

``If you can, keep this in mind, it`s just like cleaning a painting. What you want to do with a painting is to take off the old varnish without touching the paint. What you`re trying to do with a piece of furniture is to take off the old finish without cutting into the wood. If you cut into the wood, you`re destroying the object. That`s it.``